Most cited

Posts that commenters keep linking to, ranked by how many different people have cited them in Hacker News comments. 528 posts.

Hardware & Electronics
Any year
1

Computer latency: 1977-2017

I've had this nagging feeling that the computers I use today feel slower than the computers I used as a kid. As a rule, I don’t trust this kind of feeling because human perception has been shown to be unreliable in empirical studies, so I carried around a high-speed camera and measured the response latency of devices…

6

On Hacking MicroSD Cards

Today at the Chaos Computer Congress ( 30C3 ), xobs and I disclosed a finding that some SD cards contain vulnerabilities that allow arbitrary code execution — on the memory card itself. On the dark side, code execution on the memory card enables a class of MITM (man-in-the-middle) attacks, where the card seems to be…

8

From Gongkai to Open Source

About a year and a half ago, I wrote about a $12 “Gongkai” cell phone (pictured above) that I stumbled across in the markets of Shenzhen, China. My most striking impression was that Chinese entrepreneurs had relatively unfettered access to cutting-edge technology, enabling start-ups to innovate while bootstrapping…

12

The Mac Pro Lives

Apple is currently hard at work on a “completely rethought” Mac Pro, with a modular design that can accommodate high-end CPUs and big honking hot-running GPUs, and which should make it easier for Apple to update with new components on a regular basis. They’re also working on Apple-branded pro displays to go with them…

14

A Modern Space Cadet

I spend a lot of my time (easily over 8 hours a day) at a keyboard. As you might have guessed from my previous entries about Vim and Mutt I'm not averse to spending a few hours to improve an environment I'm going to be spending tens of thousands of hours in over the next few years, so it shouldn't be a shock that my…

27

An Open Letter to Intel

Thanks for putting a version of MINIX inside the ME-11 management engine chip used on almost all recent desktop and laptop computers in the world. I guess that makes MINIX the most widely used computer operating system in the world, even more than Windows, Linux, or MacOS. And I didn't even know until I read a press…